WORLD WAR THREE OR SABER RATTLING
"WE MUST LEARN FROM HISTORY TO AVOID REPEATING IT"
ARE WE HEADING TOWARD WORLD WAR THREE?
WARMONGERS OR THREE STOOGES
Putting Nato troops in Ukraine would "bring the risk of a world war closer", Hungary's foreign minister has warned after France refused to rule out sending Western soldiers into the war-torn country.
Péter Szijjártó told Russian state-run news agency TASS that the "terrifying risk of a third world war is approaching" and warned "allies and colleagues" from doing anything to trigger further conflict.
Tensions between Russia and the West are far from isolated. There are several flashpoints around the world.
It has triggered the "worst crisis in Russia's relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis", said the Daily Mail. "Even talk of a confrontation between Russia and Nato – a Cold War nightmare of leaders and populations alike – indicates the dangers of escalation as the West grapples with a resurgent Russia 32 years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union."
European leaders are thought to be tiring of the conflict, now in its third year, and resistance is growing in Washington to open-ended financial support. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that failure to fend off Russia's aggression could spiral into confrontation with Nato and that "certainly means the Third World War", said The Times.
If Putin remains "undeterred" in Ukraine, he will "almost certainly try his luck" in the Baltics, said Dominic Waghorn, Sky News's international affairs editor – "because he will assume the alliance is too spineless to stop him". That view will be reinforced if Donald Trump carries through with his threats to pull America out of the military alliance if he wins in November.
A Russian cruise missile violated Nato airspace on Sunday less than a week after Putin warned that a direct confrontation between Russia and the Western military alliance would be "one step away from a full-scale World War III", said Time.
There are fears the Russian president could use March's terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow, which left 137 people dead, as the pretext to escalate the war in Ukraine. Russian authorities have claimed the four men suspected of carrying out the attack were fleeing to safety across the border in Ukraine, although Kyiv has strongly denied any involvement and Islamic State's Afghanistan affiliate has claimed responsibility.
Middle East
For decades, Israel and Iran have been engaged in a "shadow war", said Foreign Affairs. Now, the war in Gaza is "disrupting their already delicate calculus, and the longer the conflict continues, the more it will reduce the incentives for moderation and raise the risk of Israeli-Iranian conflict".
Attacks by Iran's proxy groups, most recently on ships in the Red Sea, are part of wider efforts by Tehran to oppose Israel, end its war in Gaza and supplant the US (and, to a lesser extent, Saudi Arabia) as the foremost power in the Middle East.
Iran's allies and proxies have so far "been undeterred by the huge show of US force in the region", said Alex Rossi, Sky News's international correspondent, but Washington must "decide whether hostilities have now crossed the Rubicon", an Atlantic Council expert said.
February's drone attack by Iran-proxy group Islamic Resistance in Iraq on a US military base in Jordan sparked calls from Republicans for direct strikes on Tehran. It led Donald Trump to write on his Truth Social network: "We are on the brink of World War Three."
A confrontation between the US and Iran would "divide, perhaps permanently", Western democracies that would back Washington (such as the UK) and those who "might sensibly prioritise renewed diplomatic outreach to Tehran", said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian.
It would prolong Israel's war in Gaza, almost certainly trigger a Hezbollah attack on Israel, destabilise friendly regimes in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf, escalate violence in Iraq and Syria, help China realise its anti-democratic geopolitical ambitions and aid Russia in justifying the Ukraine war, said Tisdall.
Another concern, Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at Crisis Group, told the Financial Times, is that "Tehran will turn to another avenue to up the stakes with the US – its nuclear programme".
China
The greatest threat to geopolitical stability has long been assumed to be the growing tensions between China and the US over the past few years. Despite a slight thawing that led to a ground-breaking meeting between leaders Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in November, core issues between the two – most notably, over the island of Taiwan and the question of its sovereignty – remain.
Beijing sees Taiwan as an integral part of a unified Chinese territory. It has, in recent years, adopted an increasingly aggressive stance towards the island and its ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which it has denounced as dangerous separatists. At the same time, the US Biden has ramped up its support – financially, militarily and rhetorically – for Taiwan's continued independence.
In response to the DPP's re-election in January for an unprecedented third term, China's Communist Party has "sharpened its rhetoric towards Taiwan, raising the pressure on the country as its president-elect Lai Ching-te prepares to take office in May", said the Financial Times. China's most senior official in charge of Taiwan policy after President Xi Jinping told an annual meeting of the Communist Party that Beijing "must resolutely fight 'Taiwan independence' separatism" and "further grasp the strategic initiative to achieve the complete unification of the motherland".
While most experts agree an imminent escalation is not on the cards, any invasion "would be one of the most dangerous and consequential events of the 21st century", said The Times. It would "make the Russian attack on Ukraine look like a sideshow by comparison".
The devastating human cost aside, a military conflict between the world's two biggest economies would lead to "a severing of global supply chains, a blow to confidence and crashing asset prices", said The Guardian's economics editor Larry Elliott. "It would have catastrophic economic consequences, up to and including a second Great Depression."
North Korea
Since talks with Trump broke down in 2019 over disagreements about international sanctions on Pyongyang, Kim Jon Un has "focused on modernising his nuclear and missile arsenals", according to Sky News.
In his New Year's Eve address, he warned that the actions of the US and its allies have pushed the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war, and announced that the hermit kingdom had abandoned "the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea", said The Associated Press.
"We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war," Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker wrote at 38 North, a website that tracks developments on the peninsula.
Alongside its military development, Kim has been "chumming up to Russia and remaining on the right side of China", said The Times's Asia editor Richard Lloyd Parry.
This has "added greatly to tension on the peninsula", said Lloyd Parry, and increased the chances of so-called miscalculation – "where one side assumes that the other is about to attack, and goes first".
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